Could ‘Acting Black’ Rescue Black Education?
By Richard Davis (11/18/05)
Black students who devote themselves to their studies often report that they are taunted by their black classmates for “acting white.” So what does it mean, academically speaking, to act authentically black? The answer to that could help solve a dilemma that has perplexed American educators for 50 years: How do you improve the education of African-American children?
To liberals and many blacks the answer is obvious: You put them in white schools and hold whites accountable for their progress (attributing any inequality of results to racism). That approach has brought us to where we are today -- more racial resentment and hostility, greater academic disparities, black drop-out rates of 60 percent or more, significantly lower education standards and much broader school and societal segregation.
Wrong answers never deter liberals, however, and so once again we are hearing the drumbeat for renewed forced desegregation. The media issue a steady stream of stories about re-segregated schools, the persistent racial achievement gap, financial disparities between white and black districts, etc. An hysterical pro-desegregation jeremiad, “The Shame of the Nation” by leftist Jonathan Kozol, recently made the best-seller list.
Liberals love desegregation because of its punitive effects on the white middle class, which they see as the source of all societal ills. Retribution has always been the unspoken but impelling force behind desegregation. Focusing on race also enables liberals to deflect attention from the mess they’ve made of our public schools after 40 years of monopolistic control.
With the original rationale for desegregation (Jim Crow) now obsolete -- and the social science justifications concerning black self-esteem, racial harmony, etc., discredited -- liberals portray school integration as a moral imperative, a societal good like diversity that must be imposed upon the masses by its progressive elites (who avoid it).
But if black schools were outperforming majority schools, you’d never hear another word about desegregation or court-ordered busing. No black child would be forced from his neighborhood and bused 20 miles to an inferior school. Who talks about the moral imperative of forcing Asians and whites together?
The argument for forced desegregation today is at heart an admission by the black community that it cannot educate its own children and must turn the job over to others. The resentful, anti-intellectualism that permeates black culture has its roots in this admission. First whites are blamed as the cause of the problem, then they must be turned to as the solution.
But they aren’t the solution, and they weren’t the cause. Blaming whites never really explained much. Though blacks were certainly restricted from participating in white society through mid-century, whites never inhibited black education. There was less money in black America, true, but there was enough to provide decent schooling if that had been a priority. There is certainly enough today. The highest performing black schools in history have thrived on much less money than the worst ones do now. In truth, money has little to do with school achievement. If it did we’d all still live in mud huts.
Nevertheless, money did play a key role in worsening the achievement gap. One of the unintended consequences of Great Society welfarism is now the single greatest curse upon the black underclass and its education prospects, illegitimacy.
But could education itself be the problem? Is there an ethnic component that predestines black children to under-achievement?
Black educator Joyce E. King in her book “Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda for the New Century” begins a list of 10 “vital principles” of black education with, “We exist as African people, an ethnic family. Our perspective must be centered in that reality.” (“Ethnic family” is a euphemism for race, a word King can’t use because it violates liberal orthodoxy, which holds that races don’t really exist.)
Africans in America, King writes, live in a “world where expertness in alien cultural traditions (that we also share) have gained hegemony.” Unlike in these alien Western traditions, Africans give priority to the African ethnic family over the individual, she writes. They have different ways of knowing. The arts and humanities are “more useful” to Africans than the knowledge and methodologies of the sciences. Westerners search for facts and truth, Africans for meaning and understanding, she says.
That sounds more feminine than ethnic -- actually, it sounds more like a rationalization for poor math and science scores -- but if King is right, then it follows that ethnic families have a moral responsibility to raise their children within their own traditions, if that is what is necessary to properly educate them.
The experience of Asians and other ethnic families seems to both contradict and confirm King’s sentiments. Theoretically, Asians should encounter even greater problems than blacks adjusting to the alien West since they are more recent arrivals. Yet they excel at Western education, surpassing even the European ethnic family, both here and in Asia. That would appear to refute the family-orientation argument. But, then, perhaps something innate within the Asian ethnic family permits greater adaptability, which would seem to confirm it.
Of course, we could all confirm it. Everyone is aware of general differences, cognitive and behavioral, among the various ethnic families. We see them every day, and they are evident across the globe. Only liberals act as if they don’t exist.
But how does a society accommodate these ethnic differences, especially in education, which determines both the culture and one’s success within it? Although individuals and groups can and do embrace cultural alternatives outside the mainstream in America, in effect voluntarily segregating themselves, it is exactly this separateness that blacks have been objecting to for the past century. But is there another choice between adaptation and separation?
The hard truth is that modern mass, technological societies require a relatively high level of that analytical, “factual” competence King disparages. That’s how things work. Reduce this cognitive component below a certain point and societies become economically and socially dysfunctional. All the understanding in the world won’t save them.
Actor and ethnic filmmaker Spike Lee, no apologist for white America, last week lashed out at today’s black youth for refusing education. Lee said of his youth in Brooklyn, "Young black kids didn't grow up wanting to be a pimp or a stripper like they do now. Back then, we were not called sellouts for using our brains, and being intelligent was not frowned upon." He urged educated blacks to act as examples to the rest of the black community. Bill Cosby has been saying much the same thing.
Actors may be the appropriate spokespersons for this cause. Those black youngsters who taunt their studious peers for acting white have a valid point. But they’re wrong to attribute whiteness to it. White kids are acting too. That’s what education is. It’s a transforming experience in which students learn and rehearse script after script of unfamiliar material, eventually assuming roles in life different from what they could have assumed otherwise. That’s the drama of life, and you can act well or you can act poorly. Either way the play goes on.
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